Fern Hill is a blithe poem, yet touched by darkness; time finally holds the poet “green and dying” … Poem in October begins in Thomas’s seafront town: the poet, marking his birthday, climbs to a high hill, where he reflects on his youth and mulls his future … Poem on his Birthday distorts the “lamb-white days” of Fern Hill to the grotesqueries of “herons who walk in their shroud”: Poem in October’s sparkling ocean becomes a gull-haunted river Styx … Author’s Prologue – his penultimate work – was a lavish, exultant poem that bellowed with lust and life. It called for music as unusual as it was buoyant. And it offered A Dylan Thomas Trilogy the formal inevitability I always dreamed for it …
John Corigliano